Scanners (1981)

SCANNERS (1981)

Dir: David Cronenberg

This is more than likely my fifth time sitting down with Cronenberg’s ESP as weaponry film and I finally understand it. To be fair, I was too young when I first saw it and I was too stoned in college during my subsequent revisits.

Cameron Vale is new to his life as a scanner. He is caught and brought in to see Dr. Paul Ruth. The doctor teaches Vale how to control his abilities and uses a drug to suppress the abilities when they get out of hand. The doctor tells Vale of a renegade scanner, Darryl Revok, who is enlisting scanners to fight with him against the system. The idea is to have Vale go undercover, invade Revok's regime and stop him. What Vale learns along the way is that there is another sect of scanners who don't follow Dr. Ruth or Revok. Revok eliminates these scanners using his soldiers. We find out his big plan is to ship the drug Ephemerol out to the world to make more scanners.

Backstory kicks in and it was Dr. Paul Ruth who invented ephemerol as a sedative for pregnant women. The drug had a side effect on the offspring, they became scanners. The good doctor was the first to use the drug on his wife. They had two children; can you guess who these kids were?

The ending, in which I won't detail here, always confused me. But now – in this non-stoned viewing – I understand the happy but nihilistic ending and can say, I fully appreciate Scanners. As a kid it was all about the fantastic head explosion at the seminar, but as an adult it is the line "We won," that does it for me.